The fight for good: a reply to K.A.Dilday

I may have seen the same movies as K.A. Dilday; I may even have read the same books as her; but her piece on the third film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy confirms I don’t live in the same world as her.

There are two attitudes in the face of phenomena as popular as J.R.R. Tolkien: veneration or disdain. Disdain of stories so thrillingly told is hard, so critics go for more overarching objections. Thus Dilday, like many before her, attacks the most popular film and novel of our time for its “atavistic classicism, racism and xenophobia”.

Director Peter Jackson is condemned for choosing “his alabaster cast” and “[deciding] that the camera would lovingly caress their sky-bold eyes”. I hate to be the party-pooper on this one, but movies work like that. A lot of ugly people would like to be in movies but they don’t let them in. Stigmatic eyes don’t woo punters. As for the accusation that, in the films, the good races are all white – well yes, but then so are Saruman and Gollum.

Tolkien’s race and the race of his German enemies in war, were white. I’m sure that Benetton and countless US and UK government committees would recommend that for every ‘albaster’-elf there ought to be a Chinese, an Afro-Caribbean and a native American elf, but that’s why they don’t make blockbuster movies.

I, like hundreds of millions of others, applaud the success of The Lord of the Rings. It displays the triumph of deeply-felt desires for so long disdained. It reasserts the right of people to be given good, meaningful drama over ‘new-morality’ lessons and to be given resonant myths rather than committee-driven preaching.

It is countries and races of people (usually of the same skin-colour) that go to war, and to discuss and appreciate Tolkien we must talk about the issues he raises, not try and stop the argument with a “that’s racist” broadside.

It is a source of wonder to me that the one thing it’s not right to discuss during this age of experimental “multiculturalism” is race – at least not unless you are praising it. Listen out and you’ll hear countless people saying “I love the Irish – they’re such generous people”, or “Ethiopians, such beautiful people – lovely bone structures”. Both would be uncontroversial statements, yet both are racist. Both lump an entire race into a generalisation of behaviour or appearance.

More, it follows that if the Irish are a ‘generous’ or ‘warm’ people then there are some races that are ‘cold’ or ‘unwelcoming’, and if there is a race you highlight for their beauty then there must, correspondingly, be a race of people who are ugly to you, or at least less attractive. Like it or not, the human eye like the human heart is not changeable by committee: in a large world, race, skin-colour and nationality are, as they always have been, pretty good ways of describing people one will never know individually.

Tolkien, as a man who fought in the first world war and lived through the second, saw more than most of his critics. He once described the distance he imagined Mordor to be from the Shire as being ‘roughly’ equivalent to the distance between England and the Balkans. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why we British might regard the Balkans as a place where trouble starts. And if there is more than chance to the depictions of the West as (broadly) good and the East as (broadly) bad, it is from a British perspective utterly justifiable. During Tolkien’s lifetime and with almost no exceptions before or since, every problem that has beset Britain has come from the East.

We could see that as a racial statement, or we could see it as just one consequence of having a large stretch of water called the Atlantic over the other side. Germany’s two great attempts at ending human history came (from where I’m sitting) from the East; ditto Stalin, ditto communism, ditto Islamo-fascism, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Iraq. It’s not much use railing against it. It doesn’t even need reading into – it is just, to use an un-academic term, common sense.

In Dilday’s argument, ‘absolutes’ are shunned in the same way because political pronouncements on ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are ‘medieval’ (obviously an attack on Bush). Only in an age of such moral and cultural relativism could somebody argue this. By contrast, Tolkien’s breadth of appeal lies partly in his understanding of the importance of showing good and evil, the necessity of doing the right thing, and avoiding doing wrong.

Absolutism, race and geography are not the only areas on which Tolkien is lambasted. Genetics are also off-limits, even if, as in Tolkien, different people from different races are capable of both good and evil. Dilday despises the message that “what was bred in the bone came out in the flesh”. I’m sure she’d put it down to bad parenting, but you don’t have to sit down and compare the career trajectories of the brothers grim Uday and Qusay Hussein to ponder the possibility that bad stock exists. And if bad stock exists, then good stock must. Again, in funny ways people recognise this all the time, but only the nice way around. People can be good who have good parents, but not bad because they have bad ones. If they are evil (if you’d forgive the term) it’s something to do with a societal accident, solvable by a battalion of psychologists and literary theorists.

All these criticisms represent the worst modern vanity. Past generations held study of the past as a good thing on its own terms – one learnt history and studied language to understand the past. Today the past has only one, crass, service – to aid us in trying to understand our confused and lost selves. We look at the past and its works and judge them only on our own pride-filled and newly-invented ‘values’. Tolkien blissfully rejects such modern vanities.

The triumph of Tolkien is a good thing. For a book and a film it has remarkable practical inspiration. The overriding message of the whole tale is of great import – that every person, however small, however unworthy he feels for the task, has a part to play in the fight for good. Sadly, man makes his own choice and, like Saruman, sometimes chooses wrong because he is composed (as Omar Khayyam has it) of “heaven and hell”, of (as Auden has it) “Eros and of dust”. The ‘knife-edge’ internal struggle of Frodo and every character in Tolkien gives the lie to Dilday’s criticism of rife Calvinist pre-determinism (in any case, no sin in itself).

The appeal of these films at this time is not accidental and so their good may be practical. In Britain (perhaps even in Europe) people watching them might be reminded that running away from terror, and pacifying their enemies is neither courageous nor admirable. Even now, some people think, rather like a lot of Hobbits, that if you put your head down, if you avoid war at any price, then evil won’t come to you. Events of the last few years alone show why this attitude is madness.

Towards the end of the Nobel speech that K.A.Dilday quotes, William Faulkner said:

“It is [the writer’s] privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.” In an inglorious and decadent age Tolkien reminds us through his fantasy world of what in our real world we have done well, and of what we must be worthy.